College is brutal. The academic and social expectations that college life pushes onto its students are back-breaking, especially for unsuspecting Freshmen. Most of the time, hobbies fall to the wayside in the interest of school, sleep, and friends, depriving students of essential time for personal and creative expression. How can you avoid this? Well, it involves some fundamental changes in time management and productivity, but this indispensable item that I brought with me to college helped LOADS.
Enter: The Hobby Box
The Hobby box is simply a box containing your hobbies. You can put anything you want in it, such as game controllers, paintbrushes, plant pots, yarn, dumbbells—literally anything! The important part is that you consciously take the time to reflect on what gives you joy in your free time and put stuff in the box relating to those things.
Here’s how the Hobby Box Helps with Balance:
By dedicating a physical box and some square footage of your tiny, tiny dorm to your hobbies you are physically telling your brain that your hobbies are important to you. This psychologically helps a ton when you’re sitting in bed, watching Netflix, and unwilling to get up even though you actually want to. You know what I’m talking about.
It’s important that you place the box somewhere visible, so that you are visually reminded of your hobbies and their importance to you. You’d be surprised at the difference that physically seeing things related to your goals has on motivation; this is due to something called ‘Goal Priming.’
Happy hobbying, folks!